Gabrielle Ho­sein

That's the best way to de­scribe reg­is­tra­tion day at Ziya's first school. She wasn't there and will no doubt be per­fect­ly fine on Mon­day. It was me. I was ter­ri­fied. I have a PhD. I'm smart. I to­tal­ly didn't think about eight mil­lion ob­vi­ous things about school, like the fact that I still had to la­bel every­thing or the sense it makes to get a set of shorts and tops that we could use like a uni­form or the ob­vi­ous­ness of what reg­is­tra­tion means in terms of all the doc­u­ments they told you to bring when you first signed up in May.

I ar­rive at the school, feel­ing all shnazz that Stone and I had all done Ziya's school shop­ping, like the e-mail from the school said, and had ar­rived on time. School sup­plies? Check. La­belled and boxed? Check. Then we go to reg­is­tra­tion. Nat­u­ral­ly, I don't have any doc­u­ments I should have. Birth cer­tifi­cate? Im­mu­ni­sa­tion? Pho­tos? Signed forms? Check? Umm. No.

I sat there won­der­ing what I thought the whole point of reg­is­tra­tion re­al­ly was and trac­ing my way back through my mem­o­ry to the fact that I did know I need­ed this stuff, but had clear­ly for­got­ten in the midst of try­ing to get my fi­nalised book pro­pos­al to a pub­lish­er and prepar­ing for the start of the uni­ver­si­ty term.

I'm a con­sci­en­tious mom. I've been in con­tact with the school about giv­ing Zi a pre-school tour and about her be­ing veg­e­tar­i­an. I thought I had it in flow, but the re­al­i­sa­tion hit that I'd now need to ded­i­cate a prop­er sec­tion of my brain to Ziya and school, some­thing that hadn't oc­curred to me be­cause she's still on­ly two.

Every­day, I have to make sure that she heads off with some­thing for 'show and tell', I have to make sure that she comes home in shoes that are ac­tu­al­ly hers. I have to be more than good with her when I'm with her at nights and week­ends, I have to al­so plan for her days and fol­low up on them af­ter. It's like I'm dis­cov­er­ing a whole new world that is par­ent­ing chil­dren through school.

You think you feel like an adult when you have the ba­by and she are sprout­ing healthy and hap­py. You think that you're de­vel­op­ing greater ma­tu­ri­ty when over time you learn to bal­ance part­ner­ship, par­ent­hood, work and even a lit­tle time for self, but it's an­oth­er stage when they start school. There's much for you to learn too.

Most­ly, my les­son for the mo­ment is to be less pre­oc­cu­pied and to recog­nise that this learn­ing curve re­quires more at­ten­tion that I was used to for ear­li­er stages of her life. Like every­thing else, it will come more nat­u­ral­ly with time, but for now, I'm start­ing all new at this school thing too.

There are so many things to think about with each day that she moves out in­to the world. So many de­ci­sions and so much more to pay at­ten­tion to. Par­ents who have been here be­fore will shake their head that I'm on­ly here now, but clear­ly Mon­day's first day of school is the be­gin­ning of a lot of firsts for me too.

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